WASHINGTON - Duane R. Clarridge parted company with the Central Intelligence Agency more than two decades ago, but from poolside at his home near San Diego, California, he still runs a network of spies.

Over the past two years, he has fielded operatives in the mountains of Pakistan and the desert badlands of Afghanistan. Since the United States military cut off his funding in May, he has relied on like-minded private donors to pay his agents .

Mr. Clarridge has sought to discredit Ahmed Wali Karzai, the Kandahar power broker , and planned to set spies on his half brother, the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, in hopes of proving the Afghan leader is a heroin addict, associates say.

It is a demonstration of how private citizens can exploit the chaos of combat zones to carry out their own agenda. It also shows how outsourcing intelligence operations has spawned legally murky operations that can be at cross-purposes with America’s foreign policy.

Mr. Clarridge, 78, is described by those who have worked with him as driven by the conviction that Washington is bloated with bureaucrats and lawyers .

His dispatches - an amalgam of fact, rumor, analysis and uncorroborated reports - have been sent to military officials who found some credible enough to be used in planning strikes in Afghanistan. They are also fed to conservative commentators, including Oliver L. North, a compatriot from the Iran-contra days and now a Fox News TV analyst, and Brad Thor, an author of military thrillers and a frequent guest of Glenn Beck , a conservative TV talk show host on the Fox network.

Charles E. Allen, a former top intelligence official at the Department of Homeland Security who worked with Mr. Clarridge at the C.I.A., termed him an “extraordinary” case officer who had operated on “the edge of his skis” in missions abroad years ago.

But he warned against Mr. Clarridge’s recent activities, saying that private spies “can get both nations in trouble and themselves in trouble.” The private spying operation, which The New York Times disclosed last year, was tapped by a military desperate for information about its enemies and frustrated with the quality of intelligence from the C.I.A.

But on May 15, according to a classified Pentagon report on the private spying operation, Mr. Clarridge sent an encrypted e-mail to military officers in Kabul announcing that his network was being shut down because the Pentagon had just terminated his contract. The next day, he set up a password-protected Web site, afpakfp. com, to allow officers to continue viewing his dispatches.

Mr. Clarridge has been an unflinching cheerleader for American intervention globally. “Get used to it, world,” he said in a 2008 interview. “We’re not going to put up with nonsense.”

Known to virtually everyone by his childhood nickname, Dewey, he joined the spy agency during its freewheel-ing early years. He eventually became head of the agency’s Latin America division in 1981 and helped found the C.I.A.’s Counterterrorism Center five years later.

In his 1997 memoir, he wrote about trying to engineer pro-American governments in Italy in the late 1970s , and helping run the Reagan administration’s covert wars against Marxist guerrillas in Central America during the 1980s.

He was indicted in 1991 on charges of lying to the United States Congress about his role in the Iran-contra scandal . But he was pardoned the next year by the first President George Bush.

Now, more than two decades after Mr. Clarridge was forced to resign from the intelligence agency, he tries to run his group of spies as a C.I.A. in miniature.

Mr. Clarridge assembled a team of Westerners, Afghans and Pakistanis not long after a security consulting firm working for The Times subcontracted with him in December 2008 to assist in the release of a reporter, David Rohde, who had been kidnapped by the Taliban. Mr. Rohde escaped on his own seven months later, but Mr. Clarridge used his role in the episode to promote his group to military officials in Afghanistan.

In July 2009, according to the Pentagon , he directed his team to gather information in Pakistan’s tribal areas to help find a young American soldier who had been captured by Taliban militants. (The soldier, Private First Class Bowe R. Bergdahl, remains in Taliban hands.)

Four months later, the security firm that Mr. Clarridge was affiliated with, the American International Security Corporation, won a Pentagon contract worth about $6 million. American officials said the contract was arranged by Michael D. Furlong, a Defense Department civilian with an “information warfare” command in San Antonio.

Mr. Furlong, the subject of a criminal investigation by the Pentagon’s inspector general, was accused of carrying out “unauthorized” intelligence gathering .

It is difficult to assess the merits of Mr. Clarridge’s dispatches; some reviewed by The Times appear to be based on rumors or rehashes of press reports.

But in August 2009 Mr. Clarridge gave the military an in-depth report about a militant group, the Haqqani Network, a document that officials said helped the military track Haqqani fighters.

When the military would not listen to him, Mr. Clarridge found other ways to peddle his information. For instance, his private spies in April and May were reporting that Mullah Muhammad Omar, the reclusive cleric who leads the Afghan Taliban, had been captured by Pakistani officials and placed under house arrest.

Both military and intelligence officials said the information could not be corroborated, but Mr. Clarridge used back channels to pass it on to senior Obama administration officials, including Dennis C. Blair, then the director of national intelligence.

Mr. Clarridge and his spy network also took sides in an internecine government battle over Ahmed Wali Karzai, head of the Khandahar Provincial Council.

In early 2010, when Mr. Clarridge was under contract to the military, the former spy helped produce a dossier for commanders detailing allegations about Mr. Karzai’s drug connections, land grabs and even murders in southern Afghanistan.

The document speculates that Mr. Karzai’s ties to the C.I.A. - which has paid him since 2001 - may be the reason the agency “is the only member of the country team in Kabul not to advocate taking a more active stance against AWK.”

Ultimately, though, the military could not amass enough hard proof to convince other American officials of Mr. Karzai’s supposed crimes, and backed off efforts to remove him from power.

Mr. Clarridge would soon set his sights higher: on President Hamid Karzai himself.

Mr. Clarridge pushed a plan to prove that the president was a heroin addict - by collecting Hamid Karzai’s beard clippings and running DNA tests. He eventually dropped his idea when the Obama administration signaled it was committed to bolstering the Karzai government.

American law prohibits private citizens from actively undermining a foreign government, but prosecutions have been limited to people raising private armies. Legal experts said Mr. Clarridge’s plans against the Afghan president would probably not violate the law.

When he was an official spy, Mr. Clarridge recalled in his memoir, he bristled at the C.I.A.’s bureaucracy for thwarting his plans . “It’s not like I’m running my own private C.I.A.,” he wrote, “and can do what I want.”


By MARK MAZZETTI